• Boston Business Journal, Monday, February 3, 2014 11:48 AM

By 2016, mobile testing and monitoring firm Perfecto Mobile expects to be a "very large company" -- and possibly a publicly traded one, founder and CEO Eran Yaniv said in an interview.

As in, $100 million in annual revenue that year for the Woburn, Mass.-based company, he said. "We're thinking we can ... go so far as an IPO" as soon as 2016, Yaniv said.

The firm is already seeing "tens of millions" of dollars in revenue annually and now has "quite a predictable revenue stream," as more large companies have begun rolling out mobile apps and demanding testing services, he said.

Perfecto Mobile enables companies to test and monitor their mobile apps remotely, using the cloud, on hundreds of different mobile devices.

The testing and monitoring takes place on devices that are physically located in Perfecto Mobile's 13 data centers located around the world -- meaning that the apps can also be tested in different geographies.

The company recently expanded to a new testing data center in Wakefield, Mass., which has 10,000 square feet of space and 1,500 mobile devices for testing on.

The firm's model allows companies to use testing scripts that run automatically at any time of day -- ensuring that new app functionality always works properly (and previous functionality is still working too).

For example, a company "can create an automated script that mimics the user interaction with the application," Yaniv said. "You could put a scheduler there to make sure the user interaction occurs twice every hour, 24 hours a day, seven days a week. You can get a feel whether the app runs properly and whether or not the response times are as expected."

Perfecto Mobile reports having more than 1,000 customers, though 90 percent of its revenue comes from the largest companies in its customer base -- the 100 members of the Fortune 500 that are customers, according to Yaniv. Those include four of the largest U.S. banks and major companies in insurance, retail, travel and health care.

Founded in 2007, Perfecto Mobile initially targeted mobile carriers, but began seeing major growth about three years ago after shifting its focus to serving large companies, Yaniv said.

The firm employs a total of 130, with 40 in Massachusetts, 30 elsewhere in the U.S. and the rest at the Perfecto Mobile R&D center in Israel. The company may double the number of employees it has in Massachusetts this year, Yaniv said.

Looking ahead, other growth drivers include the arrival of new devices such as wearables, he said. "The mobile market is coming to an inflection point -- classic mobile devices are not going to be alone any more," Yaniv said.

Perfecto Mobile has raised $35 million in venture funding to date, with investors including Globespan Capital Partners, Carmel, Vertex Venture Capital (of Israel) and the Waisbein Fund.

Read the whole story at Boston Business Journal »